Hannah and Papa J

Monday, August 17, 2015

"Black lives matter" and other horrible slogans

Dear Hannah,

A short while ago President Obama made a deal with Iran -- a deal in which they got nearly everything they wanted out of us, and we got almost nothing we wanted out of them. But what was most interesting about the agreement was that after they'd won and relations should have been smoothed, the supreme leader of the Iranian people was caught shouting "death to America." A big hit with the crowd, because they were shouting it along with him.

This makes me uncomfortable for several reasons, the first of them being that we just okayed their nuclear program, and the second that they want us dead. Some well-intentioned people think they don't want us dead, because giving the benefit of the doubt is what "good" people do. These good people are idiots. You always take someone seriously when you catch them openly wishing for your death. You can take them poetically too, but this is only slightly better -- maybe they don't want us to die, but they want us to suffer. Either way they hate us.

If the phrase death to America seems a little backward, it's only because nobody running the country, excepting Obama's God damn America pastor, has been manly enough to wish our enemies a good solid death. Simply put, we're convinced that it's rude. We have a military for the sole purpose of killing people and we still won't yell it. In Iran's defense it proves that they're honest. I also imagine (and I stress imagine, because death to America isn't something you want on your search history) that it sounds much better in the Middle East. I imagine that before it's translated into English, it sounds something like fuck America. And I imagine going beyond this that if anyone told the Iranians we were shouting we wanted to fuck them, that perhaps they might think we were a little worse than they already think us now. Perhaps literal translations are why they call us the Great Satan.

We have our own slogans in the USA, of course; but these only prove we aren't as decent as the Persians. For instance there's Black Lives Matter. A quick look at their own BLM manifesto shows that they're against the improvement of terrible neighborhoods (which they call gentrification), against the success of any white businesses (which they decry as profit-making), against the use of necessary force (which they call brutality); and as Bernie Sanders so recently stated in his civil rights agenda, against the identification and avoidance of any convicted criminals (which they call discrimination). They've given up pretending that black "victims" are hard-working and law-abiding, good for neighborhoods and and children and businesses, and have decided to openly persecute every American who actually is. If they were interested in defending good black people, they might have been shouting good lives matter (which I think is more to the point than the too-ridiculous all lives matter). But good martyrs weren't available, so they passed up character and went straight for a color.

Nobody has proved this translation any better than Black Lives Matter activists themselves, who listed what we can only suppose to be the most racially-hateful homicides in the entirety of the American continent -- only committed against blacks, of course. One man they listed, Mike Brown, was proved by two independent investigations to have attacked the police officer who killed him. Gabriella Naverez was killed after ramming a police officer's car in an attempt to escape arrest -- after a high-speed chase which could easily have killed innocents. Tanisha Anderson was clinically insane and arrested for disturbing the peace, and died after she attempted resisting arrest. Tarika Wilson (whose own mother testifies she had six children by five different drug dealers) was probably the most innocent of the lot, being shot in the middle of a dangerous drug raid. The central theme of the Black Lives Matter movement is that there are innocent blacks being murdered by racist policemen all over the country. Black Lives Matter has produced none of them, which leads anyone of any intelligence to believe that black people are safe -- if they're not stupid or breaking the law. It's the criminals who are in danger. The black innocents they brutalize and black neighborhoods they destroy are irrelevant. Black lives don't matter to Black Lives Matter. Not all black lives -- just the worst. They say life to Black people but they mean death to America in general. It means the same things as the Iranians but the Iranians say it outright and our activists pretend it's something else.

In a further twist of irony, a recent speech by two Black Lives Matter activists asked a crowd of Bernie Sanders supporters to check their privilege, which is acually a call to maintain and establish privilege. And the reason why should be obvious. Nobody white has ever stormed a stage of a presidential candidate, and been given enough time not only to ramble out a ridiculous and irrelevant message, but four additional minutes for the purpose of silence. The people asking whites to check their privilege aren't only doing something nobody white could ever do, but asking for advancement only for the color of their skin.

Whites have historically only recognized privileges as the things you get without deserving them. They have also recognized privileges as things enjoyed by a minority at the expense of the majority. But Black Lives Matter wants what white people have at white people's expense without doing anything to deserve it. They want it in spite of the fact that many of their martyrs deserve the opposite (which is what many of their "martyrs" got). And they get it by claiming that privileges are evil, right before suing the pants off of the only race in America that doesn't have any actual privileges.

In the end we find that only the Iranians (who are the bad guys) are saying what they actually mean, while Americans (who are the supposed to be the good guys) are saying what they don't. Perhaps we ought to take a lesson from our national enemies and mean death when we mean it -- as we ought to mean things like privilege. But this kind of honesty seems to be only for the Muslims. We wish Americans would be better Christians -- and tell the truth so roughly that it ruins a few dinner parties.